Summer

“Summer”

All these summers to come,
Lining up for you and me.
There go the breezes through the leaves.
There go all of our summers…
I never wanted them.

Our eyes drift to one another,
As if waiting for their turn to cry.
You see tomorrow in mine
I see yesterday fading away—
But for a time, you were my faith:
My orisons to the Heaven in your heart.
But there go the breezes through the leaves,
There go all of our summers…
I never wanted them.

Sometimes I think of what could be,
I cannot control my eyes straying to the door
Where you have entered so many times before.
Anniversaries of that first footfall occur to me—
Now echoes of a stranger—an autumn that never was
And I had mistakes to live.

We met in the leaves and the rain,
You danced in the stairway of an empty city.
The sun was pale, and I saw the summer to be
In the rays you captured in your voice.
But the truth always waited for us to lie—
And the sky, shrouded, opened no doorways
To a dawn of another anniversary.
And there go the breezes through the leaves,
There go all of our summers…
I never wanted them.

© 2022 Marten Hoyle